VICTORA: 100-year-old school test offers challenge, insight

Published: Saturday, August 17, 2013 at 05:10 PM.

My days, both at home and at work, are filled with questions, and I pride myself on being able to answer as many as possible.

My brain is a flow chart of who needs to be where when, and what they need to be doing. Some days, there is so much chaos I have to literally blink to refocus on what I had been doing seconds earlier.

You can stump me — it’s not that hard — but I’m going to try my darnedest to be ready the next time a similar challenge comes around.

Had I been around 100 years ago, I would have been seriously stumped, particularly if I was trying to graduate from eighth grade in Bullitt County, Ky.

I would never have made it into high school.

Last week, a reader sent a copy of a 1912 article detailing questions on the eighth-grade examination. They make the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test seem easy. Heck, some of them make college seem easy.

Here are a few examples:

l “Find the amount of $5,030 for 3 years, 3 months and 3 days at 8 percent.”

I can’t.

l “Diagram: The Lord loveth a cheerful giver.”

Diagramming sentences is a lost art, one that most of us master at a young age and promptly forget. Maybe I knew this one when I was in eighth grade.

l “How does the liver compare in size with other glands in the human body?”

Ummm, it’s bigger, definitely. Even I know that.

But you have to admit, those are impressively challenging questions for 13- and 14-year-olds.

And that reminds me of what I have long believed.

Kids today may have more academic and sports pressure, but they’re not as taxed in general as generations past.

They’re learning higher-level thinking, but at the expense of some basic real-life knowledge.

One thing I noticed in particular on that test was that every single math problem had to do with a real-life equation.

Here’s another one: “How many steps 2 ft. 4 in. each will a man take in walking 2 ¼ miles?”

I’m not ready to travel back in time and I’m glad kids have a chance to grow up differently than they did back then. But using the 1912 exam for inspiration, I might need to tweak my parenting approach a bit.

Instead of giving them orders, I’ll give them a word problem.

“If three kids spend 10 minutes arguing about a chore that would have taken five minutes, how many chores could they have accomplished in the same time?”

My days, both at home and at work, are filled with questions, and I pride myself on being able to answer as many as possible.

My brain is a flow chart of who needs to be where when, and what they need to be doing. Some days, there is so much chaos I have to literally blink to refocus on what I had been doing seconds earlier.

You can stump me — it’s not that hard — but I’m going to try my darnedest to be ready the next time a similar challenge comes around.

Had I been around 100 years ago, I would have been seriously stumped, particularly if I was trying to graduate from eighth grade in Bullitt County, Ky.

I would never have made it into high school.

Last week, a reader sent a copy of a 1912 article detailing questions on the eighth-grade examination. They make the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test seem easy. Heck, some of them make college seem easy.

Here are a few examples:

l “Find the amount of $5,030 for 3 years, 3 months and 3 days at 8 percent.”

I can’t.

l “Diagram: The Lord loveth a cheerful giver.”

Diagramming sentences is a lost art, one that most of us master at a young age and promptly forget. Maybe I knew this one when I was in eighth grade.

l “How does the liver compare in size with other glands in the human body?”

Ummm, it’s bigger, definitely. Even I know that.

But you have to admit, those are impressively challenging questions for 13- and 14-year-olds.

And that reminds me of what I have long believed.

Kids today may have more academic and sports pressure, but they’re not as taxed in general as generations past.

They’re learning higher-level thinking, but at the expense of some basic real-life knowledge.

One thing I noticed in particular on that test was that every single math problem had to do with a real-life equation.

Here’s another one: “How many steps 2 ft. 4 in. each will a man take in walking 2 ¼ miles?”

I’m not ready to travel back in time and I’m glad kids have a chance to grow up differently than they did back then. But using the 1912 exam for inspiration, I might need to tweak my parenting approach a bit.

Instead of giving them orders, I’ll give them a word problem.

“If three kids spend 10 minutes arguing about a chore that would have taken five minutes, how many chores could they have accomplished in the same time?”